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Comment by Ihmahr | Hacker News Reader

Is there some NSA influencing online discussion in this thread? I mean seriously, why the down votes?

I don't think so :), we're not that important. So far only 3 comments have been seriously downvoted -- one of them presented seemingly unfounded information, the other one was simply unfunny trolling that should not be on HN, the third one was mostly off-topic.

Because of - to some extent understandable - reasons MS hate is still quite strong among this community but destroying an MS-related thread is unnecessary.

Do you really think a site has to be "important" to be targeted? To influence public opinion it seems like you'd just want to blanket influence as many popular websites as possible. It wouldn't take that large a team to do it given the right software.

I was a part-owner and later a mod on a quite big forum (>500k registered users, etc.). There were many people who always claimed that others who disagree with them are paid shills -- I happened to know that they aren't at all.

Heh, same here. If everyone who accused someone of being a shill was right, then everyone would be a shill, almost. Hilarious stuff, literally insinuating that someone had built up a reputation on a tech magazine forum over half a decade to shill products. In fact, I think in the years I was a mod/admin, we banned maybe one "shill", and even that was debatable and mainly because they didn't post any relevant information for anything else.

I've suspected for a while that the NSA has some kind of software like google alerts that monitors the top 1000 relevant sites and detects when they are being talked about so they can turn the discussion. We know from Snowden leaks that they are attempting to influence public opinion online, so that seems like how I would do it. Also I've noticed that previous threads like this are particularly full of naysayers.

Your opinion doesn't matter I thought they made that clear.

I think that both your arguments are true.

Whilst our opinions are indeed irrelevant, they still try and influence the discussion.

Why? Because the military-industrial complex has invested vast amounts of public money in technology, contractors and employees to allow them to do just that.

Companies like Booz Allen Hamilton are making buckets of cash selling the government this kind of tech and the contract staff to go with it.

The government buyers are being taken on jollies in the Caribbean and receiving nice kickbacks for authorising the public purse. Next year both parties plan on increasing the budget. And so the merry dance goes on getting bigger and bigger every year.

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